Terminology Management and Post-Editing

Recent developments in machine translation have led to an expressive increase in the accuracy and productivity of the machine translation engines, followed by a significant reduction in their prices, creating conditions for this technology to finally achieve the expected impact on the translation market. We believe that machine translation will be, in a very near future, an integral part of most translation processes; to produce a text for subsequent post-editing or simply to be used as an initial draft by human translators.

With the purpose of enabling our team to provide terminology management and post-editing services, in November 2011, BLC successfully implemented the machine translation software Systran Translation Project Manager for the main accounts. Over the last ten months, we have been focusing on the development of specialized glossaries for each of these accounts with the purpose of calibrating Systran engine and generating machine translation content to be used as a starting point by our translators. The results have been amazing, with increased consistency and accuracy in the use of terminology, improved productivity of our translators and editors and the transfer of terminology control to our team of in-house terminologists.

Our next move will be to prepare our team of In-house Translators to train our Freelancers to effectively perform post-editing tasks according to the quality specifications defined by our clients. There are still some loose ends to be tied up in the training strategy, but one thing is for sure: machine translation has come to stay!